Last week was, by any standard a bad one for women. Sure, it started out well enough with the annual platitudes of Mother’s Day, but it went quickly downhill from there. Here are some of the highlights, or more accurately, low lights:

(L)ast Wednesday, Mr. Boehner refuted his own argument by ramming through the House a bill that seriously weakens the Violence Against Women Act. That followed the Republican push in Virginia and elsewhere to require medically unnecessary and physically invasive sonograms before an abortion, and Senate Republicans’ persistent blocking of a measure to better address the entrenched problem of sex-based wage discrimination.

Further down the hall, other members of Congress once again took a hatchet toUNFPA funding,

In one fell swoop, the Appropriations Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives voted today to wipe out $39 million in funding for UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund. By voting to ban any U.S. contribution to UNFPA in FY2013, House Appropriators made a judgment call that saving the lives of women and girls around the world is simply not a U.S. priority.

Despite valiant efforts led by State Foreign Operations Subcommittee Ranking Member Nita Lowey (D-NY), amendments that sought to reinstate funding to UNFPA for specific activities failed. Committee members voted against amendments that would permit funding to UNFPA for preventing and treating obstetric fistula, ending female genital mutilation, and providing family planning services and contraceptive supplies in nine sub-Saharan African countries with high rates of poverty and maternal mortality where USAID does not provide family planning assistance.

And finally, in Chicago, NATO began meetings that demonstrate their commitment to Afghan women’s rights by excluding Afghan women from the table, necessitating a shadow summit so that these voices, that are crucial to any realistic discussion of the path forward in Afghanistan, are heard.

That was just the last week in the sustained barrage of attacks on women’s lives. But yet the New York Times opines that whether or not to call this a war on women is a political argument. Oh really? What the dickens else would you call it? We have a wishful tendency to think of war as something that happens elsewhere. But as this sad smorgasbord of women hating shows all too clearly, the powers that be in this country are deliberately intent on indeed waging a very global war on women.

One Response to “A Week In The War On Women”

I think that the earth would be well off if women were the decision makers. It is a shame that all these lines are being drawn, and we feel compelled to stand up against their drawing and also the lines. I know that there is terrible grief connected with these examples, but maybe our energy would be better used by working toward actually helping the people who need help and ignoring the political process (which we know is corrupt).